1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to casual social games.
2. Technical Background
There are multiple technical challenges facing the designer of computer implemented games. These challenges can be broadly categorised into the following areas: ‘engagement’; ‘viralisation’ and ‘monetisation’.
We will look first at ‘engagement’, which involves designing game play to be engaging and rewarding to players. This typically requires games to be easily understood at their simplest or introductory levels, providing rewarding game play with even quite simple game mechanics, but becoming progressively more challenging so that players are not bored, but remain engaged and develop rewarding skills. Effective engagement requires various forms of feedback to reinforce players' sense of success and accomplishment. Effective engagement can be greatly magnified if the game has as social aspect—for example, it is linked into a social network so that game players can interact with their friends in the social network. The game can then transform into something that goes far beyond a simple solo game experience, into a shared journey.
‘Viralisation’ requires a game to be include various techniques that encourage players to share the game with others, encouraging them to play the game. It is a key technique in enabling mass-scale distribution or penetration of games. Viralisation can be especially effective when the game is integrated into a social network environment in some manner, so that the game can then propagate through the network of player's friends, and their friends and so on.
‘Monetisation’ covers those techniques that enable revenue to be generated from a game; this involves many challenges, because the monetisation techniques need to be acceptable to players and in no way undermine engagement.
A successful and original game will requires a team of game designers to solve complex problems of engagement, viralisation and monetisation; this can take many months of skilled work and, not infrequently, a great deal of trial-and-error testing of new ideas, functions and game mechanics before a game successfully combines all these elements into a new experience.
The techniques described in this patent specification can be deployed in many different game play architectures. For example, a computer game can be implemented as a computer program that is stored and runs entirely locally on the processor of a PC, games console, tablet or mobile telephone or other computing device. The game could be implemented solely as a computer program that is stored and runs entirely on one of many processors in a remote server, and data streams are supplied to the client device (e.g. tablet, smartphone etc) to enable the client to render and display graphics and sounds; this ‘web services’ approach is increasingly common. Another approach is a hybrid, in which back-end servers handle some elements of the game play, but a Java game applet is provided to client devices and it is the locally running Java applet that generates the graphics/sounds/user interaction for game play on the player's client device. Some data may be fed back to the back-end servers to enable scoring, interaction with other players and cross-platform synchronisation. Generally, the techniques described in this specification are not specific to any one game architecture but can be deployed on any suitable game architecture.
This patent specification describes not only various ideas and functions, but also their creative expression. A portion of the disclosure of this patent document therefore contains material to which a claim for copyright is made and notice is hereby given: Copyright King.com Limited 2011 and 2012 (pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 401). A claim to copyright protection is made to all screen shots, icons, look and feel and all other protectable expression associated with the game Bubble Witch Saga, illustrated and described in this patent specification.
The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but reserves all other copyright rights whatsoever. No express or implied license under any copyright whatsoever is therefore granted.